If we run into a supply crunch, some features of modern life might be in trouble.

A few centuries ago, there were just a few widely used materials: wood, brick, iron, copper, gold, and silver. Today’s material diversity is astounding. A chip in your smartphone, for instance, contains 60 different elements. Our lives are so dependent on these materials that a scarcity of a handful of elements could send us back in time by decades.

If we do ever face such scarcity, what can be done? Not a lot, according to a paper published in PNAS. Thomas Graedel of Yale University and his colleagues decided to investigate the materials we rely on. They chose to restrict the analysis to metals and metalloids, which could face more critical constraints because many of them are relatively rare.

The authors’ first task was to make a comprehensive list of uses for these 62 elements, which was surprisingly difficult. Much of the modern use of metals happens behind closed doors in corporations under the veil of trade secrets. Even if we can find out how certain metals are used, it may not always be possible to determine the proportions they are used in. The researchers' compromise was to account for the use of 80 percent of the material that is made available each year through extraction and recycling.

The next task was to determine if there were any substitutes for these uses. But as Graedel writes, “the best substitute for a metal in a particular use is not always readily apparent.” Elemental properties are quite unique, and substitution will often reduce the performance of the product. But it can be done.

Two examples stand as a testament to that fact. In the 1970s, cobalt was commonly used in magnets. When a civil war in Zaire caused a scarcity of cobalt, scientists at General Motors and elsewhere were forced to develop magnets that didn't use it. More recently, a shortage of rhenium, which is used in superalloys for gas turbines, forced General Electric to develop alternatives that use little or no rhenium.

Graedel’s analysis of substitutes involved ploughing through scientific literature and interviewing product designers and material scientists. The results are a sobering reminder of how critical some metals are. On seeing the data, Andrea Sella of University College London said, “This is an important wake-up call.”

PNAS

None of the 62 elements have substitutes that perform equally well, and 12 out of the 62 have no substitutes at all (or if there are substitutes, they are inadequate). These 12 elements are rhenium, rhodium, lanthanum, europium, dysprosium, thulium, ytterbium, yttrium, strontium, thallium, magnesium, and manganese.

Economists have long assumed that a shortage of anything will promptly lead to the development of suitable substitutes, an attitude fostered in part because there have been successful substitutions in the past, such as in the cobalt and rhenium examples. But metals are special, Graedel said: “We have shown that metal substitution is very problematic. Substitution would need to mimic these special properties—a real challenge in many applications.”

“The clarity of Graedel’s thinking is impressive,” said Sella. “No one has analyzed metal criticality in such detail.” One of Graedel’s biggest contributions has been developing a visual way of understanding how critical metals are. The researchers created a 3D map, where the three axes represent supply risk, environmental implications, and vulnerability to supply restrictions.

The scarcity of metals came to public attention in 2010 when China suddenly decided to restrict its export of a group of metals called the rare earths. Prices of these metals shot up by as much as five times and caused companies around the world to consider reopening their rare earth mines. This situation had knock-on effects on the prices of everything from gadgets to wind turbines.

Some comfort may be drawn from the fact that consumptions of some metals can peak. For example, the use of iron has reached saturation in many countries, and in the US, this seems to have happened for aluminum, too. This saturation is the case only for bulk metals, however. Scarcer metals, even with superior recycling, may never reach saturation.

Apart from China, a handful of countries, including the US, South Africa, Australia, Congo, and Canada, hold the most diverse and largest metal reserves. “A national disaster or extended political turmoil in any of them would significantly ripple throughout the material world in which we live,” said Graedel.

This measured analysis, published in PNAS, is a warning of a serious issue. “But Graedel has a thoughtful way of putting it,” said Sella.

A lot of times the issue isn't that we're going to run out of some material, but rather that everybody who is currently mining it is at capacity and may not be able to handle future growth. Or they may in fact be running out. The thing is, there is usually other places on Earth where you can find those materials, they just weren't economically feasible to exploit while the old cheap mines were running.

So what we might be looking at is knees in the graph where the average price jumps because the old cheap mines ran out and newer more expensive mines had to take over. Sometimes there is even old mines that were driven out of business decades ago by cheap overseas suppliers that can get back in production with relatively little capital investment (at least when compared to prospecting and opening up a whole new mine and processing facility).

Isn't it the case with rare earths, though, that they're not really all that rare, it's just that China was mining and selling them so inexpensively that everyone else simply stopped investing in mining/processing operations most everywhere else?

I wonder if anyone will ever develope a usable organic computer that used the same buidling blocks as other organic life, Carbon, Oxygen, and Hydrogen are not going to be in short supply any time soon.

Another option is off-world mining but that seems even less plausable than organic computers.

I didn't see anything in the study about catalyst or other critical components used in the making of the parts but don't end up in the parts themselves. That would be another critical point.

That was covered in the bit about "behind closed doors in corporations under the veil of trade secrets." At least catalysts are largely recycled, which would stretch out processors' stocks during a supply disruption.

I remember a while ago during a rush to replicate a cold fusion experiment, palladium prices shot through the roof which was bad news for industries that do something useful with palladium. Not every supply disruption is due to a disaster.

Nobel prize to whomever can first make practical elemental synthesis reactors.

Actually this has been done quite a bit using research fission reactors. Just to prove a point, they even turned lead into gold. The problem is that the costs of the equipment and energy required make commercial application out of the question.

I wonder if anyone will ever develope a usable organic computer that used the same buidling blocks as other organic life, Carbon, Oxygen, and Hydrogen are not going to be in short supply any time soon.

Another option is off-world mining but that seems even less plausable than organic computers.

I remember reading a news article recently that stated that there are several companies whose goal is to be mining asteroids in the next 3-5 years. If they find what we need, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to bring it back.

That said, we humans are a rather inventive species. If we run out of something, I'm sure we'd be able to find something else that would be able to be a suitable replacement.

I'm not particularly worried. As long as the current way of doing things is cheap and easy, we will keep doing it that way. If the cost starts to go way up, people will invest money in doing things another way or using alternate materials.

Longer term, asteroid mining has the potential to solve pretty much all of our low volume/high cost material problems. Within the next few years the technological barriers will be completely gone and someone will just have to go do it.

"Rare earth elements aren’t actually that rare, but the process for mining for and extracting them is currently a relatively energy-intensive, environmentally tricky, and costly practice. The United States maintains some pretty tight restrictions on their domestic production"

For the foreseeable future, asteroid mining will only be feasible for construction in space... the cost of lassoing a megaton of iron or nickel is offset by the fact that you don't need to shoot a megaton of stuff into orbit.

Space flight will need to get orders of magnitude cheaper to make it economical to de-orbit even an asteroid made of platinum.

Well, all these metals should be ending up in our dumps. Someday it may likely be profitable to mine those dumps.

Are we not shipping waste electronics by the boatload to countries like India for "recycling"?

There are potentially riches in those piles of electronics garbage. Someone just needs an economical way to extract them for reuse. Unfortunately, I haven't heard of any companies that can do this just yet without losing money in the process.

Well, all these metals should be ending up in our dumps. Someday it may likely be profitable to mine those dumps.

I was actually wondering almost precisely that. How feasible is it to recycle or recover the metals in "old tech junk"? ... or, in theory, how practical would it be to do that if faced with a global shortage? I'd imagine getting metals back out of chips likely isn't trivial, but I'm curious just how bad it would be.

Well, all these metals should be ending up in our dumps. Someday it may likely be profitable to mine those dumps.

Are we not shipping waste electronics by the boatload to countries like India for "recycling"?

There are potentially riches in those piles of electronics garbage. Someone just needs an economical way to extract them for reuse. Unfortunately, I haven't heard of any companies that can do this just yet without losing money in the process.

aluminum is highly recyclable. And it's cheaper to recycle it since extracting it from its natural form is so resource intensive.

Well, all these metals should be ending up in our dumps. Someday it may likely be profitable to mine those dumps.

I was actually wondering almost precisely that. How feasible is it to recycle or recover the metals in "old tech junk"? ... or, in theory, how practical would it be to do that if faced with a global shortage? I'd imagine getting metals back out of chips likely isn't trivial, but I'm curious just how bad it would be.

Landfill mining has been proposed since 1953. "Mining" a heap of old gadgets would extract more metals but less of the other products (like stuff that can be burned to power the mining operation itself).

Well, all these metals should be ending up in our dumps. Someday it may likely be profitable to mine those dumps.

Are we not shipping waste electronics by the boatload to countries like India for "recycling"?

There are potentially riches in those piles of electronics garbage. Someone just needs an economical way to extract them for reuse. Unfortunately, I haven't heard of any companies that can do this just yet without losing money in the process.

aluminum is highly recyclable. And it's cheaper to recycle it since extracting it from its natural form is so resource intensive.

Aluminium is not a large component in our modern electronics. Once it is extracted/recycled i doubt it can be utilized for new electronics due to impurities. I was mainly referring to the metals mentioned in the article that do not have any known substitutes.

I remember reading a news article recently that stated that there are several companies whose goal is to be mining asteroids in the next 3-5 years. If they find what we need, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to bring it back.

Anybody who claims that they will be mining an asteroid in 3-5 years is bullshitting you, probably because they want you to give them money. I'm not sure which will happen first, commercial fusion power plants, or commercial asteroid mining. Both have similar timeframes in my head.

You do realize the majority of that deep sea mining stuff was just a cover for a cold war USSR submarine recovery operation by the US, right? The little bit of actual mining they tried afterwards turned out to be as unprofitable as everybody said it would be. Metal prices would have to spike pretty high for this to make sense.

Buh freaking Hu? The nice thing about these rare metals is that they are available pretty much anywhere in the world (most of them) they are just much easier to find in some regions. So for the current price it's not worth it to mine them in Arkansas. But if their absence would threaten our way of living this would definitely be different.

If you look at the China example you could have mentioned that this sparked the reopening of some long abandoned mines in California and Australia. Substitution is not the only possibility. We can also just find more of the stuff elsewhere. Might not be easy but...

A couple of years ago everybody was talking of peak oil peak gas and that the markets cannot fix high oil and gas prices anymore because we will soon run out.

Then came fracking. Gas is dirt cheap. The US will soon be self reliant in hydro carbons and some people need to eat a lot of crow. It just takes a while. New technologies are not developed over night.